Ascidians

“ The Athenians being indignant at the claim, Aristides came forward; "To contend with the Tegeatans," said he, "for noble descent and valor, the present time permits not: but this we say to you, O you Spartans, and you the rest of the Greeks, that place neither takes away nor contributes courage: we shall endeavor by crediting and maintaining the post you assign us, to reflect no dishonor on our former performances. For we are come, not to differ with our friends, but to fight our enemies; not to extol our ancestors, but ourselves to behave as valiant men. ”

“ The Athenians pushed on for the Assinarus, impelled by the attacks made upon them from every side by a numerous cavalry and the swarm of other arms, fancying that they should breathe more freely if once across the river, and driven on also by their exhaustion and craving for water. ”

“ For an instant the Greeks paused in their pursuit, and the barbarians rallied from their flight, and all eyes turned upon the Hun and his opponent. The fate of Azimantium--the last relic of Grecian and of Roman glory--hung upon that brief moment. An instant decided all, for before fear could become hope in the hearts of the Huns, the charger of the barbarian chief was wild upon the plain, and he himself, cleft to the jaws, lay motionless before Menenius. A thousand souls seemed in the hero's bosom, and plunging into the midst of the enemies, he drove them down the steep. ”

“ From every quarter suspicion had gathered around Alcibiades, and the Athenian people were determined to have him tried and executed; so they sent a summons to him and to others against whom information had been given. He was ordered to follow the officers home and defend himself, but the latter were told not to arrest him; for the Athenians, having regard to their interests in Sicily, were anxious not to cause excitement in their own camp, or to attract the attention of the enemy. [11]
So Alcibiades and those who were accused with him left Sicily. ”

“ The Egyptians moreover among their fables report, that in the time of Isis, there were men of vast bodies, whom the Grecians call Giants, and whom they place in their temples in prodigious shapes, who are whipt and scourged by them that sacrifice to Osiris. Some idly give forth, that they sprang from the earth, when at first it gave being to living creatures. Others report, that from many extraordinary things done by men of strong bodies, the fables and stories of giants arose. But In this most agree, that for the war they raised against the gods Jupiter and Osiris, they were all destroyed. ”

“ An Ascidian has a body divided by a single septum and with two orifices, one where it takes in the fluid matter that ministers to its nutrition, the other where it discharges the surplus of unused juice, for it has no visible residual substance, such as have the other Testacea. This is itself a very strong justification for considering an Ascidian, and anything else there may be among animals that resembles it, to be of a vegetable character; for plants also never have any residuum. ”

“ The Byzantines, thus surprised and astonished, while they all hurried to the defense of their port and shipping, gave opportunity to those who favored the Athenians, securely to receive Alcibiades into the city. Yet the enterprise was not accomplished without fighting, for the Peloponnesians, Boeotians, and Megarians not only repulsed those who came out of the ships, and forced them on board again, but, hearing that the Athenians were entered on the other side, drew up in order, and went to meet them. ”

“ To consecrate the Greek conquest, Thomas Palaiologos had married the heiress of Centurione II Zaccaria, the last Frankish ruler, and the last legitimate descendant of a famous Genoese family, which had made a fortune out of the alum-mines of Phocæa on [501] the coast of Asia Minor, become lords of the rich island of Chios in the days before the Chartered Company, and had at last attained to the throne of Achaia. But Centurione had left a natural son, Giovanni Asan, who had raised the standard of revolt against the Greeks. ”

“ Thus Alcibiades, quitting the interests of the Spartans, whom he could no longer trust, because he stood in fear of Agis, endeavored to do them ill offices, and render them odious to Tisaphernes, who, by his means, was hindered from assisting them vigorously, and from finally ruining the Athenians. For his advice was to furnish them but sparingly with money, and so wear them out, and consume them insensibly; when they had wasted their strength upon one another, they would both become ready to submit to the king. ”

“ In a life of indolence in which their energies were never tried either by stance on the part of the natives, or by hard labour of their own, even Greeks speedily lost all elasticity of body and of mind. None of the brilliant names in Greek art or literature shed glory on the Italian Achæans, while Sicily could claim ever so many of them, and even in Italy the Chalcidian Rhegium could produce its Ibycus, and the Doric Tarentum its Archytas. ”

“ No sooner did the gates of death close upon that sweet and genial spirit, than war, lust, strife and pestilence burst upon the very people he had so tenderly loved. The story of Assisi becomes, as it had never been before, a list of murders—of struggles to the death for individual power, and of wars which made the fair Umbrian country a desolate and cruel waste for months and even years. ”

“ IX. Aristides, a wise and just Greek, of greatest honour and trust with the Athenians;—he was a great enemy to cabals in government: the reason he renders is, "Because," saith he, "I would not be obliged to authorize injustice." He so much hated covetousness, though he was thrice chosen treasurer of Athens, that he lived and died poor, and that of choice: for being therefore reproached by a rich usurer, he answered, "Thy riches hurt thee more than my poverty hurts me." ”

“ The Romans who sent for Aesculapius from Epidaurus, when their city was troubled with the plague, say, that the serpent that was worshipped there for him followed the ambassadors of its own accord to the ship that transported it to Rome, where it was placed in a temple built in the isle called Tiberina. In this temple the sick people were wont to lie, and when they found themselves no better, they reviled Aesculapius: so impatiently ungrateful and peevish were often the afflicted, that they made no scruple to reproach the very god who administered to their maladies. ”

“ Death was their servant. They ordered. Death obeyed. In the obedience was apotheosis. In the apotheosis was the delirium that madmen know. At their feet, Rome, mad as they, built them temples, raised them shrines, created for them hierophants and flamens, all the phantasmagoria of the megalomaniac Alexander, and, with it, a worship which they accepted as their due perhaps, but in which their reason fled. That of Cæsar withstood it. Insanity began with Antony, who called himself Osiris. The brain of Tiberius, very steady at first, was insufficiently strong to withstand the nectar fumes. ”

“ But when they heard much noise as of men engaged in fight, and a messenger, they say, came from Pausanias, to advertise them of what was going on, they soon hasted to their assistance. And as they passed through the plain to the place where the noise was, the Greeks, who took part with the enemy, came upon them. Aristides, as soon as he saw them, going a considerable space before the rest, cried out to them, conjuring them by the guardian gods of Greece to forbear the fight, and be no impediment or stop to those, who were going to succor the defenders of Greece. ”

“ Alcibiades, therefore, judged it would be a glorious action, which would do honor to the gods and gain him esteem with men, if he restored the ancient splendor to these rites, escorting the procession again by land, and protecting it with his army in the face of the enemy. For either, if Agis stood still and did not oppose, it would very much diminish and obscure his reputation, or, in the other alternative, Alcibiades would engage in a holy war, in the cause of the gods, and in defense of the most sacred and solemn ceremonies ”

“ After the fight, Themistocles, to sound Aristides, told him they had performed a good piece of service, but there was a better yet to be done, the keeping Asia in Europe, by sailing forthwith to the Hellespont, and cutting in sunder the bridge. But Aristides, with an exclamation, bid him think no more of it, but deliberate and find out means for removing the Mede, as quickly as possible, out of Greece; lest being enclosed, through want of means to escape, necessity should compel him to force his way with so great an army. ”

“ Assisi, no longer oppressed by the nobles, harassed by the armies of Perugia, or alarmed by the coming of the despots whose power was on the wane all over Italy, lost her character of individuality as a fighting and turbulent city, and sank beneath the wise and beneficent government of the Papacy. ”

“ The peasants, whose grain had been trampled down by the Baglioni, were driven half-naked into the woods, and watched the high roads from the heights above Assisi like birds of prey, swooping down to rob or kill travellers passing by. Badgers, wolves, and foxes roamed unmolested in the plain, and fed upon the unburied bodies of the murdered travellers and of those who fell in battle; while, in the dead of night, the friars of the Portiuncula stole out to bury what bones the wild beasts had left. ”

“ His address to Arcadius (De regno) is full of advice as to the studies of a wise ruler in such perilous times. His three years’ stay in Constantinople was wearisome and otherwise disagreeable; the leisure it forced upon him he devoted in part to literary composition. The Aegypius sive de providentia is an allegory in which the good Osiris and the evil Typhon, who represent Aurelian and the Goth Gainas (ministers under Arcadius) , strive for mastery; and the question of the divine permission of evil is handled. ”

“ So we find the cult of deities such as Sabazius, Mater Magna (see Great Mother of the Gods) and Attis, Adonis, Isis, Serapis, Mēn Tyrannos, carried on in Greek states, and especially in seaports like the Peiraeus, Rhodes, Smyrna, without protest, but almost certainly without moral benefit to the worshippers. The famous passage in Demosthenes (de Corona, sect. 259 foll.) shows, however, that the initiation at an early age in the rites of Sabazius did not gain credit for Aeschines in the eyes of the best men. ”

“ Aristides, making this proposal and bringing back the ambassadors into the assembly, charged them to tell the Lacedaemonians that all the treasure on the earth or under it, was of less value with the people of Athens, than the liberty of Greece. And, showing the sun to those who came from Mardonius, "as long as that retains the same course, so long," said he, "shall the citizens of Athens wage war with the Persians for the country which has been wasted, and the temples that have been profaned and burnt by them." ”

“ War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is nov fashionable to say in a satirical spirit that such wars did not so much break out as go on indefinitely between the city-states of medieval Italy. It will be enough to say here that if one of these medieval wars had really gone on without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year, in one of our great modem scientific wars between our great modern industrial empires. ”

“ And striking down the tyrant, made the men of Athens free."
The exhilarating notes stirred every Grecian heart. Some waved their garlands in triumph, while others joined in the music, and kept time with branches of myrtle.
"By Phœbus! a glorious song and divinely sung," exclaimed Alcibiades: "But the lovely minstrel brings danger to our hearts in those sweet sounds, as Harmodius concealed his sword among myrtle leaves."
Hipparete blushed, and with a quick and nervous motion touched her cithara. With a nod and a smile, Aspasia said, "Continue the music, I pray you." ”

“ Here swiftly and silently as the foe advanced, men and women with their children would disappear into the bowels of the earth, some being occasionally buried beneath masses of soil shaken down by the tramp of many feet above them. Repeated dangers of this sort at last decided the Assisans to meet their enemies in more war-like fashion, and to surround themselves—as Perugia had done—with stones and mortar. Soon the town bristled with towers and turreted gateways, and the houses, no longer built of wattle and mud, began to foreshadow the strongly fortified palaces of a later date. ”

“ The more prudent of the Athenians were filled with apprehension for the future of the state under such guidance. The noted misanthrope Timon gave expression to this feeling when, after Alcibiades had secured the assent of the popular assembly to one of his impolitic measures, he said to him: "Go on, my brave boy, and prosper; for your prosperity will bring on the ruin of all this crowd." And it did, as we shall see.
The most prosperous enterprise of Alcibiades, in the Timonian sense, was the inciting the Athenians to undertake an expedition against the Dorian city of Syracuse, in Sicily. ”

“ And Anchises made answer: “O my son, seek not to know the greatest sorrow that shall befall thy children after thee. This youth the Fates shall only show for a brief space to man. Rome would seem too mighty to the gods should he but live! What mourning shall there be for him! What a funeral shalt thou see, O river of Tiber, as thou flowest by the new-made tomb! No youth of the race of Troy shall promise so much as he. Alas! for his righteousness, and truth and valor unsurpassed! O luckless boy, if thou canst haply break thy evil doom thou shalt be a Marcellus. ”